Once your yearlong word study plan is in place, your weekly lists are created, and you have completed your individual inventories, [link to Tip 99: Word Study Program: Assess Students’ Spelling Development...] it’s time to implement your word study program. We usually do not begin our first unit until the third week of school. Each week follows the same routine.

Every Monday a new spelling pattern is introduced during a 30 minute lesson. Before the pattern is introduced, students take a pretest to assess their ability to apply the pattern to 10 teacher-selected words.

All students are then given ten pattern words to study at home. Students who score a 90% or better on the pretest are given more challenging words (that follow the same pattern) for their study list.

On Monday they get a word study homework packet that explains the new spelling pattern to parents and describes the related word work activities. Students have all week to work on the packet at home and are asked to return it to school on the following Friday, the day of the weekly test.